Start Here: Catholic Home Education in the UK
Good books for a Catholic home — for every family raising Catholic children, whether they are at school or taught at home.
New to Catholic home education in the UK? Pull up a chair and put the kettle on. This is really just the conversation I wish somebody had sat me down and had with me at the beginning, written out so you can dip in and out of it.
We have been homeschooling our three boys for more than five years now, and I remember the beginning of it very clearly. I looked at them and understood that their faith and their education were really the same question, and then I worried for a good long while that I was not the person to answer it. I was not a teacher. I had no idea whether I could do this.
What I would say to myself now, if I could go back, is that you do not need to be a teacher. You know your children, which is the part nobody else can do, and the rest is good books and a rhythm you can actually keep. It arrives more slowly than you would like and then one day you notice it has arrived.
Everything below is just how it looks from this kitchen. You may read some of it and think that would never work in our house, and you will very probably be right.
1. Yes, you can do this: the legal basics
This was the bit that frightened me most and turned out to be the simplest. In the UK, parents are responsible for their children's education, and educating at home is a lawful choice. There is no obligation to follow the National Curriculum, keep school hours or sit SATs. What the law asks is that your child receives an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, ability and aptitude.
- England and Wales: if your child is on a school roll, you write to the head teacher to say you are taking them out to home educate, and the school removes them from the register. If your child has never been to school, there is currently nothing to register. Your local authority may get in touch to ask how things are going.
- Scotland: if your child attends a state school, you need your local council's consent before withdrawing them.
- Northern Ireland: the rules differ again, so it is worth a word with the Education Authority.
A change is coming. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 will introduce a "Children Not in School" register in England and Wales, along with consent requirements before some children can be withdrawn from school. None of it is in force yet and it is expected from 2027 at the earliest, after consultation. Nothing changes for your family today, and we will keep this page up to date as the details firm up.
This is a friendly overview rather than legal advice. The official guidance is at GOV.UK: Educating your child at home, or your own nation's equivalent.
2. Why we use American Catholic curriculum
There is very little Catholic home-education curriculum written in the UK. The United States has decades of it: complete, faith-filled programmes from publishers like Memoria Press, Mother of Divine Grace, Seton and Logic of English, a great many of them in the classical tradition. They are wonderful, and they are difficult and expensive to get hold of from here. That is the whole reason this shop exists. We bring them over, so you pay one UK price and nothing unexpected turns up at your door.
A few things that caught us out, so they do not catch you out:
- American spelling ("color", "favorite"). Mine took it entirely in their stride, and it turned into rather a good conversation about how language travels.
- Dollars and imperial units in some maths books, Saxon among them. We have come to quite like it, because it keeps them flexible with numbers, but I remember blinking at the first page.
- American history in some years. When it matters we can point you to British and Church-history alternatives instead, so do ask.
3. US grades and UK school years
American curriculum is organised by "grade", and the simplest rule of thumb is that a US grade is one number behind the UK year, so 1st grade is roughly Year 2.
| Age (on 1 Sept) | England & Wales | US grade |
|---|---|---|
| 4–5 | Reception | Pre-K |
| 5–6 | Year 1 | Kindergarten |
| 6–7 | Year 2 | 1st Grade |
| 7–8 | Year 3 | 2nd Grade |
| 8–9 | Year 4 | 3rd Grade |
| 9–10 | Year 5 | 4th Grade |
| 10–11 | Year 6 | 5th Grade |
| 11–12 | Year 7 | 6th Grade |
| 12–13 | Year 8 | 7th Grade |
| 13–14 | Year 9 | 8th Grade |
| 14–15 | Year 10 | 9th Grade |
Honestly though, I have stopped thinking about the labels much at all. We have kept a child a grade lower in maths for a while simply so that he could feel capable, and speeding up later was far easier than going back would have been. Nobody has ever asked. If you would like a second pair of eyes on it, email me and we will work out together where your child would be happiest starting.
4. What does a homeschool day actually look like?
Ours begins with prayer. I pray for each of the boys by name, out loud, one at a time, before we open a single book. It takes half a minute and it sets the temperature of the whole morning. We get to a weekday Mass as often as we can manage, and on those mornings everything else bends around it.
Then the hardest thinking while minds are freshest, which here means maths, and phonics when they were smaller. Read-alouds after lunch. Afternoons for projects, or outside, or nothing in particular.
A few things we have picked up along the way, for whatever they are worth in your house:
- Formal lessons turned out to be far shorter than I had imagined. When mine were five or six, an hour or two of focused work made a good morning. The teenager needs a great deal more than that. The rest of the day still counted as education, which took me ages to believe.
- We stagger the start of the year rather than beginning everything in the same week. Some subjects are in week three here before others have begun at all, and for a child who finds the sheer volume of writing hard going, that one change made more difference than anything else we tried.
- We work at the pace the child is comfortable with rather than the pace printed on the schedule. It makes me nervous every single time. It has been the right call every single time.
- Four weeks on and then a proper break, instead of six weeks and a half term. It suits this family far better, though I know families who would find it maddening. Being able to choose at all is one of the real gifts of educating at home.
And on any given day one of them will build a catapult out of the maths manipulatives instead of doing the factoring. I have learned to let that count for something too.
5. What will it cost?
You can spend a lot or a little, and I would much rather you spent a little and felt comfortable. The grade bundles come in two parts so that you only buy what you actually need:
- Core Bundle: the essentials for the year. If you only want one thing, this is the one I would choose.
- Optional Bundle: the extras that enrich the year, such as teacher keys, flashcards, posters and additional readers. Lovely to have, and they can wait.
A good many books (read-alouds, saints' lives, the Bible) go round again with the next child and the year after that, so the cost spreads out further than it first appears. There are usually some bargains in our second-hand books as well.
6. Faith at the heart of it
The Church calls the family the "domestic church", and parents the first educators of their children. For us this has never been about recreating school at the kitchen table. It is about forming the whole child, with prayer and the liturgical year and the saints and good books running through perfectly ordinary days.
The small things turned out to carry most of it here: a morning offering, a saint's story over lunch, keeping the feast days when we remember and starting again when we forget. Our Books for Catholic Families shelves are where I would browse first, for you quite as much as for the children.
And if I could press one book into the hands of every Catholic homeschooling mother I meet, it would be The Temperament God Gave Your Kids. Not because it solves everything, because nothing does, but because it changed how I saw my own children. It gave me a way of understanding who they actually are rather than who I had assumed they would be, and it is rooted in the Church's own understanding of the person. I rather wish I had read it before I had looked at a single curriculum.
The questions we get asked most
Do I need to be a teacher?
No, and I promise you that as somebody who worried about it for a very long time. You know your child better than anyone ever will, and the curricula we stock come with teacher's manuals that genuinely do tell you what to say and do each day.
What about exams?
This is the question that comes up more than any other, and I did not realise at first that there is more than one answer to it.
Home-educated young people can sit GCSEs and IGCSEs as private candidates at an exam centre, and A levels afterwards the same way. Most families start thinking about it around thirteen or fourteen.
We have taken a different route with our eldest, who is fourteen now: he is working towards an American high school diploma with AP exams alongside it, rather than GCSEs and A levels. APs are single-subject exams graded out of five, and they can be sat here, in London, through Prometric, with registration opening in the autumn for the following May. UK universities do take them seriously, and some are very specific about it. Edinburgh, to take one example, asks for the diploma plus three APs at grade 4 or above, or an SAT or ACT score together with two APs.
We are at the beginning of all this rather than the end of it, so I cannot tell you yet how it turns out. But it was a real relief to me to find out that following an American curriculum does not oblige you to swap everything over to GCSEs at fourteen, which is what I had assumed for years. Both routes are open, and I am very happy to share what we learn as we go.
Will my child be lonely?
It was my first worry too, and in our experience it turned out to be the opposite. Local home-ed groups, parish life, sports clubs and co-ops fill a week up remarkably quickly. Our parish was where we found ours.
Can you post it, or do I need to collect?
Either, whichever suits you. Tracked UK delivery is now available at checkout: £3.95 on orders up to £49.99, £5.95 from £50 to £99.99, and £11.95 over £100. Or you can choose to collect from us in Haynes in Bedfordshire at no cost, and I will email you to arrange a time once your order is ready. Things we have in stock are usually ready within two to four working days; anything on pre-order takes a few weeks.
The twice-yearly American Buy works a little differently, because it crosses the Atlantic in one consignment and gets sorted into family bundles at this end, so there is a collection day here at Haynes. If you are too far away to come, do say and we will work something out.
Would you rather just talk?
Sometimes a page is no substitute for a conversation. You are very welcome to book a free call with me and we can talk through your children, how your family's days actually run and where you are in all of this, and work out a starting point together. There is nothing to buy and I will not ask you to.
If you would like to carry on reading
Choose Your Path → Open-and-go grade bundles, an established programme or hybrid academy, or building your own.
Books for Catholic Families → Stories, saints and prayer books, by age.
Or just ask us → We are home educators too, and there is no such thing as a silly question here.